While acknowledging Byzantium’s possession of competing antique and post antique theories of vision, Byzantine historians have often favored a theory in which sight has the ability to physically touch the image as if kissing and embracing its surface, an idea developed in primate sources through metaphors and literary tropes.

Roland Betancourt. “Tempted to Touch: Tactility, Ritual, and Mediation in Byzantine Visuality.” Speculum, volume 91, no. 3 (July 2016): 660–689.